We found Mr. Abel Baggpott waiting for us at the hall. I introduced him to the members of the company, and he extended a limp hand and a mute glance to each in turn. He then turned to me and said in even, expressionless tones:
“The Young Water-Wagonites’ Glee Club met this morning, and in the interest of the cause and out of courtesy to me as their president, have offered their services to sing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ when I make my first entry to-night, and afterwards to sing ‘Father, dear Father, Come Home,’ as angels round the bedside of Little Mary in the fourth act, when the dying child is imploring her father to sign the pledge.”
I begged Mr. Abel Baggpott to convey my warmest thanks to the Young Water-Wagonites Glee Club for their kind offer, which I gladly accepted, only regretting that we were unable to announce the news on our posters.
We then started rehearsal, and I soon found that Mr. Abel Baggpott had not overrated his memory the previous night, for he was absolutely letter perfect in the heavy and prolix part of Mr. Romaine, the temperance reformer. But I must say that his conception of the virtuous moralist reminded me of the title of a book my aunt Urania gave me when I was fourteen, which was called ‘Who Being Dead, Yet Speaketh,’ and Mr. Abel Baggpott might have been its hero, so impassive and immovable was his mask-like face while he delivered Mr. Romaine’s most vehement and damning denunciations of drink. It was like hearing distant thunder in a clear sky. Or, to change the metaphor, it sounded quite subterranean. Only once during the rehearsal did I notice the faintest gleam of animation cross his Sphinx-like countenance. That was when Miss Laurie, who looked quite bewitching in the soubrette part of Mehitable Cartwright, was stage-kissed by Barney as Sample Swichel. I saw Mr. Abel’s mouth twitch as he watched the operation, and was near enough to hear him mutter something like ‘Ong-kore! ong-kore!’ which I took to be some Maori expression of approval, disgust, or excitement. It was impossible to tell from the transient touch of expression on the massive features of the President of the Young Water-Wagonites’ Bond, which of these three feelings momentarily possessed him.
We rehearsed again and again, for I was determined to leave nothing to chance. We rehearsed till the solemn tolling of the bell from Mr. Marrow’s tower warned us that the ‘tarbelldot’ was on the table.
Yours, with brightest anticipations,
VAL.
XII
En Route:
TARAWERA ROAD.
8th April, 1913.
MY DEAR DICK:
Once again have my high hopes been shattered by the cruel force of inopportune circumstance! Once again has the withering wind of misfortune laid low the little crop of the Merry Marauders just when it was ripening unto harvest.
Let me take up the relation of events where I left off—on that auspicious evening when the Merry Marauders sat down to Mr. Marrow’s tea-table full of confident anticipations that fame and fortune awaited their forthcoming production of Ten Nights in a Bar Room before the people of Wanaunga, and under the patronage and in the presence of the members of the Wanaunga No-License Association and the members of the Young Water-Wagonites Bond. We all made a good meal on the one dish provided by Mr. Marrow for his ‘paying guests’—a dish described on the hand-written menu as a ‘sortie’ of veal, and which, as I subsequently discovered, did indeed carry the war into the enemy’s camp—and then we all set out for the hall in the highest spirits.
There was an immense audience; the largest the Merry Marauders had ever played to. Mr. Adam Baggpott had done his work well, and had sold four hundred tickets among his brethren in the temperance cause, thereby pocketing quite a snug commission, though the worthy man assured me he was not actuated by the desire for sordid gain. He and his son, Mr. Abel Baggpott, were escorted down to the hall by the members of the Young Water-Wagonites Bond, flying the white flag of purity and singing the battle-song of their Order, followed by all the jeering louts of the town. Mr. Wonser, the temperance and prohibition candidate, arrived at the same time in the buggy of one of the Wanaunga members of his committee. He was heartily cheered, and I had the honour of a personal introduction to him through the courtesy of Mr. Adam Baggpott.
Among the early purchasers of tickets was Mr. Gill, the brewer, who demanded ‘eight front seats,’ and put down a sovereign and four shillings. Curious to know what he wanted with such a number, I peeped through the ticket-box window and saw him distributing the tickets among a group of fat men whose inflamed faces seemed to indicate that they were not associated with the cause of temperance. I learnt afterwards that the fattest and reddest of them was Grimsby-Bung, the liquor trade candidate. I wondered what had brought them to the show. It seemed improbable that they had come to imbibe a moral lesson at their late hour of the day. They emitted a penetrating odour of whiskey and strong cigars when they laughed—which they did loudly and frequently, as though amused at some capital joke. Their laughter should have put me on my guard, but it didn’t. I merely reflected, as I watched them march up the centre of the hall, and fling themselves into front chairs with a unanimous impetuosity and force which made the hall shake, that their money was as good as anybody else’s. Their appearance among the serried ranks of teetotallers caused much the same sensation as would be created by the devil strolling into a Catholic conference and requesting the assembled priests to sprinkle him with holy water. The audience stared and nudged and rustled and whispered. The brewery brigade took no notice, but presented an impassive front of red-faced stolidity that was quite tremendous. They had thrown away their cigars before entering the hall, so they evidently intended to behave themselves. I noticed Mr. Gill extract a fat black weed from his pocket and lick it longingly, but he put it back in his pocket again.
By the time I was able to close the ticket office and go behind, the curtain was up, and the second scene reached. This is the thrilling moment when the interior of ‘The Sickle and the Sheaf’, the ill-fated hostelry where the Ten Nights in a Bar Room take place, is revealed to the gaze of the audience for the first time. Now, with all the best intentions in the world, the Merry Marauders had never yet been able to stage this bar-room scene properly. This was not the fault of the stage directions. They were clear enough, reading thus:
SCENE II.—Interior of ‘The Sickle and the Sheaf.’ Set bar L.H.C.: set shelves. Bottles, cigar boxes, tumblers, &c, on shelves. Bottles with whiskey, brandy, &c, in them Table R.C. Two chairs, stool R. 2 E. Four cigars on shelf, cards on table, dice and box on shelf, chair in front of the bar newspaper on bar, glasses on bar, chair for MORGAN. GREEN discovered at table. FRANK behind the bar arranging bottles.
And so on. Implicit directions easy enough to follow, but our trouble was that we could never get enough bottles to make the stage bar look like a real hotel bar. And meagre as our supply of empty bottles invariably was, we always found greater difficulty still in obtaining sufficient cold tea to stock the bottles, in order to convince our trusting audience that the landlord of ‘The Sickle and Sheaf’ was able to supply his customers with the best brands of wine and spirits. As the majority of the patrons of ‘The Sickle and Sheaf’ die drunkards, or murder one another in the course of the play under the influence of the strong drink vended to them by the iniquitous landlord, it was necessary that the illusion of liquor in plenty should be kept up. On one occasion, when the landlady of the hotel where we were staying had been unable to supply us with more than one pint of cold tea to accomplish the downfall of a dozen drunkards, I had supplied the deficiency with a bottle of dye and had filled the bar bottles with coloured water. But although Mr. Morrissey and Mr. Bunne are such finished actors as to be able to gulp down mouthfuls of cold tea on the stage with an air of actual relish, they drew the line at the coloured water, and made such fearful grimaces over the flavour that I never repeated the experiment.
On this occasion I was surprised to see ‘The Sickle and Sheaf’ looking exactly like the real thing, instead of the pitiful, cold-tea fraud of a teetotal author’s imagination. The bar s
helves were crowded with bottles of recognised brands, filled with ruddy and yellow liquor. Real soda syphons were on the bar counter, and—greatest marvel of all—a box of real cigars was invitingly displayed. Usually we borrowed a cigar box and stocked it with one threepenny smoke, which each customer purchased ostentatiously and put back furtively for the next man. I was satisfied there was no deception about these cigars, for I watched the male characters of the drama (with the exception, of course, of Mr. Romaine, the moralist,) help themselves, light up, and puff forth such fragrant smoke that my mouth positively watered. To add to the realism of the scene, a faint odour of whiskey wafted itself to me at the wings. Even this did not warn me of an impending disaster. I supposed that Mr. Morrissey, or Mr. Bunne, or perhaps both, had prefaced a trying performance of make-believe with a dram of proof strength.
As Barney came off at the end of the first act, hot and breathless from a fierce struggle with the villain, I complimented him on the realistic setting of the bar.
“Yes, isn’t it splendid?” he assented cordially. “But the credit’s all due to one of our utility men, Carrer. I had nothing at all to do with it.”
“Carrer? Why, how did he manage it?”
“Blest if I know, but I’ll tell you what happened. You know what a trouble we always have in getting enough bottles for the bar? Well, to-day I couldn’t get a bottle for love or money, and I was just wondering whether we could make the audience believe people take their liquor out of medicine bottles in America, when Carrer strolls in and asks me in an off-hand way whether I needed any bottles for to-night. This was about the middle of the day, just when you’d knocked off for luncheon. When I told him I was fairly stuck for some ‘props’ he said that he had a friend of his in the town who was ‘in the bottle way’—whatever that may mean—and he thought he could get him to lend us a good stock for the run of the piece. He said he would go and get them, though he told me he couldn’t get back before 7 o’clock, as his friend didn’t knock off till six. That’s why Carrer didn’t turn up at rehearsal this afternoon—I told him I’d make it all right with you. Well, he drove up with his friend after seven, just when I was beginning to get anxious, and built up the bar just as you see it now, and had it all ready by the time the orchestra tuned up.”
“And who filled the bottles?”
“They came like that. Carrer says his friend keeps a lot of full ones as dummy stock to hire out to hotel-keepers who want to make a good display, but he gave us full permission to empty as many as we need during the run of Ten Nights in a Bar Room. The liquor in them is coloured by a special process, and guaranteed to be quite harmless to the human system.”
“And extra good the colouring process is, I assure you,” remarked Mr. Morrissey, walking up to us. “I feel quite revived after sampling it. I advise you to try a drop, Barney.”
“Not I!” replied Barney, firmly. “If I started swilling cold tea or ‘trick’ whiskey and water in the heavy drinking part of Sample Swichel I should be in agony by the third act. No; give me an empty tumbler every time.”
“Well, I must certainly thank Carrer for this,” I said, strolling away towards the dressing-room on the O.P. side. “His friend has done us a good service.”
“Long may he flourish!” said Mr. Morrissey. “I’m half inclined to stick to his coloured water for the rest of my time on earth.”
And—fool that I was!—I didn’t suspect anything even after that. It never for one moment occurred to me that this tale of Carrer’s friend and his kindness was all humbug, designed to cover a far deeper move. But how was I to guess that there existed in real life a villain as double-dyed and black-hearted as any to be found in the pages of the lady novelist? Who was to imagine that there breathed a member of the Merry Marauders so base as actually to sell the company to the liquor party in the town in order to cover Ten Nights in a Bar Room and the Wanaunga Prohibitionists with ridicule, and win the election for Grimsby-Bung? Not the manager of the Merry Marauders, for one. Yet so it was. This man, this Carrer, who had received nothing but kindness at my hands; this utility snake whom I had warmed in my managerial bosom (for he himself had assured me, with tears in his eyes, that since I had been manager of the Merry Marauders he had been paid his salary regularly every Saturday for the first time in his professional career as a utility actor in the ‘smalls’) had bitten the hand that fed him and wickedly sold the company for a paltry bribe. For at the instigation of Gill, with the active assistance of the foreman of his brewery, and the crafty co-operation of the fat red-faced men who occupied the front seats (all of which I subsequently found out when too late) the immoral scoundrel had stocked the stage bar-room of Ten Nights in a Bar Room with the very best genuine brands of wine and spirits, surreptitiously conveyed from Gill’s brewery for that express purpose, and placed on our stage shelves in sufficient quantities to have intoxicated all the male inhabitants of the East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand!
And I never guessed it! In the second act I actually went and sat in the front of the house in order to delight my managerial eye with the superb realism of the stage bar. Mr. Adam Baggpott saw me, and beckoned me over to sit with him and Mr. Wonser, who heartily congratulated me on the moral and artistic success of the great temperance drama. Mr. Wonser kindly said that he felt sure the presentation of such a highly moral play in such a creditable manner would appreciably increase the prohibition vote on polling day. It was a proud moment for me, but alas, Wonser spoke too soon.
It was not till the fourth act was well under weigh that I noticed something had gone wrong. From my place in front I observed a slight tendency to ‘mis-cue’ by Mr. Bunne and Mr. Baker, who respectively enacted the parts of the villain, Harvey Green, and the sunny-hearted boy, Willie Hammond, who is dragged down to drink by Green; and more than a slight tendency on the part of the male characters (with the exception of Barney and Mr. Abel Baggpott) to gather round the bar and drink ‘coloured water’ to an extent which I now shudder to remember. Mr. Morrissey, who was taking the part of Joe Morgan, the wretched drunkard who is reclaimed on the brink of a drinker’s grave by a wife’s devotion and a daughter’s sacrifice, hobnobbed with Carrer, who was taking the part of the landlord of the ‘Sickle and the Sheaf,’ instead of cursing him as the ‘book’ directed him to do; and he finished up by giving such a realistic representation of a drinker in his cups that he almost fell over the footlights into the front row of teetotalers. But the audience, I hoped, took this to be a vivid bit of acting.
I was glad when the scene changed to the home of the drunkard Morgan, and the deathbed of his dying child, who, before she dies, extorts a promise from her drunken father that he will never, never, never drink again. We had arranged a very effective tableau for this, in which the Young Water-Wagonites Glee Club were to assist by wafting the deceased child’s spirit to a happier world than this to the strains of an invisible angel refrain, ‘Yes, there’s room for Mary there.’ The only difficulty was about the part of little Mary, the angelic child. Owing to the heavy cast required in Ten Nights in a Bar Room, we had ingeniously ‘cut’ the part in the second act, where little Mary is supposed to dart on with ‘forehead bloody, falls C.’, according to the stage directions, having been struck by the glass hurled at her father by the brutal landlord of the ‘Sickle and the Sheaf.’ Instead, the glass was thrown into the wing, where Miss Gunderly was stationed to knock over a chair and scream ‘Father, dear father, they’ve killed me,’ just at the proper moment, and Morgan, when cursing the landlord and assuring him he should die ‘the death of a dog by the side of his murdered child,’ drags him off to the wing as an indication to the intelligent audience that the child has been murdered there—and the curtain falls. But the actual death-bed scene of little Mary had to be arranged differently, because it was one of the most effective ‘curtains’ in the whole play, and could not be left out. We had therefore fallen back on our old resource of having the dying child played by an adult actor—Carrer in this instance,
for he had played the part this way before, and could not only imitate a child’s treble tones wonderfully, but could fill them with a vibrant feeling in the death-bed message which was really most effective and pathetic. I had been rather against the makeshift in view of our last painful experience when we used it in East Lynne, but Barney pointed out to me how much more economical the device was than training a child artiste just for a fortnight. And certainly, Carrer acquitted himself splendidly at rehearsal—better, I thought, than in the heavier part of the landlord, Simon Slade—so it was arranged that he should do the two parts. In the death-bed scene ‘Little Elsie Montgomery’—as Carrer was called on the bills—in the part of Little Mary, was carefully covered with bed-clothing in a stage bed placed at the back of the stage, had her head swathed in bandages, and lisped forth her pathetic entreaties to her father as he bent over her. It was, therefore, most unlikely that the audience would get even a glimpse of Mr. Carrer’s rather dissipated countenance, but to make such a calamitous contingency impossible I insisted that little Mary’s dying speech should be delivered in darkness, with her heart-broken parents in front of the death-bed, completely shutting it off from the view of the audience, while adding to the impressiveness of the touching tableau. Then the angels (in the shape of the Young Water-Wagonites Glee Club) were to sing their heavenly welcome to the little martyr in a hushed silence, broken only by the heartrending sobs of the repentant father, after which the curtain was to fall with just enough light turned on to show Joe Morgan clasping his weeping wife with one hand, and pointing solemnly to heaven with the other—still grouped in front of the dead child’s cradle.
It came off as I had planned, and was a most effective and affecting scene—so affecting, indeed, that the sobs of the stricken parents on the stage were swelled by genuine sobs from some of the ladies of the audience. Never had I seen a house so moved, and my annoyance at the actors’ lapses in the earlier portion of the act was completely swept away by the artistic triumph of the moment, Even the row of fat red-faced men in the front seats—the brewery brigade—seemed affected as the faint dulcet strains of the angel chorus drifted over the footlights as the curtain fell.
The Merry Marauders Page 16